Avatars and Videogames

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Definition and Background

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vatars are computer-generated icons or figures used to help individuals identify and represent themselves within a virtual environment. Avatars can exist in many types of virtual environments, including Social Media, Forums, Blogs, Chat Rooms, and Video Games. A video game is a game played by electronically manipulating images produced by a program. These games can be played on many different devices like phones, computers, and video game consoles. Avatars often appear in three-dimensional forms in virtual worlds in video games, and they allow players to customize their features, clothes, accessories, and other attributes. In the games, individuals become associated with their avatars. So, the actions and representations of the avatars reflect upon the intentions and identities of the users that are playing with them. Ethical implications of avatars include issues of lack of representation, dissociation from the actions of avatars, false identities, and other issues.

Various avatars from Sims game via [1]

Avatar Creation

When creating an avatar in a video game, players are often able to choose skin color, hair, clothing, body build, gender, and other qualities. In some games, like the Sims, players can even choose personality traits for their avatars. By creating an avatar that resembles their appearance in the real world, players are able to connect more with their avatars, have a more immersive experience in the game, and just generally experience higher game enjoyment. The competitiveness, goals, and fanbase of a video game, as well as the background of the players themselves, can all heavily influence the decisions players make when choosing an avatar. For example, extroverted, dominant, strong avatars tend to excel more in competitive shooting games, while non-competitive games are less likely to need such specialized skills, and so players have more freedom with the attributes they choose. This also often results in more options in non-competitive games when it comes to personalizing avatars.

Commercialization and Inaccessibility

As video games become more popular, they usually begin offering purchasable virtual assets in their virtual worlds. These virtual assets can be anything from game currency to power-ups, and they are used to enhance and augment a user's experience in the game. Often, developers allow players to buy attributes specifically for their in-game avatars. This can include things like clothing and accessories, but it can also include hairstyles and skin/eye colors, which are major things that make up a person’s physical appearance. People are more likely to spend their real money on these assets in multi-player games, where the purchasing of the assets leads to players being noticed, respected, and interacted with within the game. However, many people cannot afford these special customizations. When features that make up a person’s basic appearance, like hair and skin color, are turned into something a player has to buy, video game developers are making the personalization of avatars inaccessible to players who are unable to spend extra money on these virtual assets. This can severely impact a user’s experience with a game since, as mentioned previously, having a similar avatar to one’s real-life appearance can help a player connect and interact with a video game more because they see an accurate representation of themselves on the screen.

Lack of Representation

Historically, the gaming industry has been dominated by white men, and so the ‘default’ avatars in video games are often white men. In order to have different features, players have to go and customize their avatars in a separate menu, and sometimes that is not an option, or the features that most resemble their real-life appearance are not available in the game.

Gender

In 2016, there were 350% more men involved in the video game industry than women, even though the US census showed that the population was about 51% women and 49% men. However, many games only offer one avatar, and it is usually male. Others offer female avatars, but the default when the game is first played is male. Others have more customization options for outfits and accessories for the male avatars compared to the females. Additionally, when female avatars are included, they are often sexualized and viewed differently than their male counterparts. A common trope seen in video games is that of the “damsel in distress”. Super Mario Bros, one of the most successful video game franchises, originally released a game that focused on Mario, a male character, who fights and completes quests and tasks in order to save the helpless Princess Peach from the villain. For women, there is no option to play as a female character that saves a man. However, as Super Mario Bros has grown and developed new games, they have created many options to play as Princess Peach or other female characters, so they have become more inclusive over time.

Gender is not binary though, and as difficult as it is for women to find avatars that represent them, it can be even more difficult for people who don’t identify as cis male or cis female to find video games with avatars that are inclusive to their gender. By only including “boy” or “girl” as options for an avatar's gender, video games isolate many users who do not identify as one of those options. This is discriminatory towards the transgender community and can cause harmful situations in multiplayer scenarios where the gender that a transgender player chose can cause other players to question their gender identities.

Sexuality

Many video games provide options for avatars to interact with a “significant other” of some kind. This person can add to the storyline of a video game, or enhance the general experience that a player has through conversations and stories that happen on the side. Some video games are fully focused on romance, with romance and love playing a central part in the game’s theme. However, most of these games target and cater to heterosexual people. If you identify as a male in the beginning, the video game assumes you are interested in females, and vice versa. Of course, some games have worked to make it so that you can choose the gender of your love interest, but that is not always the case. Sims 2 is one such example, gay couples are able to get married in the game, adopt children, and live together just like a heterosexual couple would be able to. However, when Sims first came out, gay couples could only move in together, not officially get married. Even a small difference like that sets heterosexual and homosexual people apart, and it can cause players in the LGBTQ+ community to feel like they are not seen as equals. For those games that don't provide any options to homosexual players, witnessing an avatar that is supposed to represent that player behave in a way they never would because of their sexuality can seriously deteriorate a player’s experience in a video game.

Race

According to a 2015 study, 83% of non-hispanic black teens, 71% of white teens, and 69% of Hispanic teens play video games. Even though more black teens play these games, it can be difficult to find representation of black people in many video games, especially in avatars. The first game that included a black character was Heavyweight Champ, an arcade fighting game from 1976. For a while, the only games that included black people were ones that were sports-related. Over time, more people of color were included in a greater variety of games. A 2011 study showed that in a range of about 150 games, 80% of characters were White, 11% Black, 5% Asian, 3% Latinx, and 1% Biracial. Compared to the US census that year, the only minority group that was not underrepresented in relation to real-world figures was Asians. This lack of representation can be harmful to players who identify as people of color, who can never play as a character in a game that looks like them.

Inaccessibility

Different Temple Run characters via [2]

A very popular mobile game - Temple Run - was downloaded by over 2 billion people worldwide by 2021. Even with such a diverse and large expanse of consumers, when players first open the game, they are greeted by “Guy Dangerous”, their avatar for the game. He is a white, able-bodied, middle-aged man, and he is the character that players are forced to play with immediately after opening the game. Other characters like “Scarlett Fox”, a White woman, “Barry Bones”, a Black man, and “Karma Lee”, an East-Asian woman, can be purchased as an avatar after playing for long enough to acquire the coins needed to purchase them. Access to these characters requires effort and time, but access to Guy Dangerous is given freely. For people looking for representations of themselves in their games, it can be disheartening to think that they have to work harder to have the same experience that white male players have just by opening the game.

Racial Stereotypes

With increasing inclusivity in video games for people of color, concerns have arisen about possible bias and stereotyping seen in the games. A study done in 2014 explored how White video game players' perceptions of Black and Asian people could be impacted by the stereotypes seen in the games they played. For their study, they looked at the stereotypical Black male criminal character, someone “deviant/criminal, violent, unattractive, having a low work ethic, and as not very friendly, trustworthy, or intelligent.” The study found that those white individuals who played certain games more than others were more likely to have unfavorable opinions and attitudes towards Black individuals in real life. They were often using the same stereotypes found in the games, which shows that these games can affect how players view others. Another common stereotype is that of the “gangbanger” and drug dealer Latinx and Hispanic characters. Again, this relation between violence and a certain community of people can cause people to form opinions and biases against a group of people solely based on experiences from virtual reality. Another common but different stereotype is that of the hypersexualized Asian woman. In games, these characters are hypersexualized, put in revealing clothing with large breasts and butts, and placed and posed in ways that accentuate and draw attention to these features. Dead or Alive Extreme 2 was marketed as a game about volleyball, but once people downloaded the game they realized that a lot of the mini-games included young women in bikinis and other revealing clothing that the players could choose to put them in. Again, being exposed to these stereotypes can affect how people who play these games view Asian women in the real world, so just including people of color doesn’t automatically promote inclusivity and awareness. Developers must be aware of these stereotypes and try not to support them through their characters.

Sexualization of Female Characters

Video games gained popularity during the 2000s when women were not really involved or included in the tech industry. So, the first games that came out didn’t cater to women and what they wanted to see. Over time, women began gaining an interest in games and started playing the same games that were originally designed for men. However, women quickly noticed that the female characters are often scantily clad, objectified, and unrealistic compared to their male counterparts. World of Warcraft, a very popular game with about 8 million monthly players, includes options for their female audience, but they are limited and not equal to the options and variety male players receive. When creating a female character on this platform, a player gets about 5 choices for hair, face, accessories, piercings, etc., and only one choice for body type. This body type is unrealistic and hyper-sexualized. For clothing, when you first start, the basic armor given covers most of the avatar's skin. However, as you progress through the game and get “powerful” armor, the armor is smaller and covers less of the avatar. This is also unrealistic because in a real war, less armor couldn’t offer more protection. However, if a player with a female avatar wants to do well in the game, they are forced to choose these outfits that clearly show much more skin than the male avatar options. This is not only seen in World of Warcraft, it is common in lots of games.

Popular female video game characters via [3]

These sexualized avatars also open players who use them to different kinds of unwanted attention and comments from other players who are attracted to the way the avatars look. It can create an unsafe space for younger players on a platform where communication between players is allowed. The risk of harassment and ridicule from male players is a common reason for why women choose not to play video games, which further continues the cycle of video games being male-dominated. A study from 2014 also found that women who played with sexualized avatars in video games showed signs of self-objectification and a difference in the way they viewed themselves and their bodies. These avatars set unrealistic expectations for how a woman can look, and it can cause players to feel poorly about themselves. This is another reason why women may stay away from video games.

Morality

Generally, increasing options and variety for avatars allow for more personalization, which is beneficial because players can more closely relate to their avatars. However, being able to relate to an avatar may not be a good thing if the actions that the avatar is performing are overly violent or aggressive. As games become more realistic, players can be influenced by games and feel more personally involved with characters and their identity within the game, and having an accurate avatar will only increase that involvement. A study showed that after playing violent video games, where characters have to be violent in order to do well in the game and accomplish their end goal, and violence is justified in these games, players didn’t reject violent behaviors as much as they had before playing the games. After being exposed to “justified” violence, violence in the real world was not taken as seriously by the players. Another issue arises with self-esteem and avatars. It has been found that players with more conventionally attractive avatars are more likely to be confident in social contexts within the video games, forming friendships and having more conversations than they would with less attractive avatars. So, players over time are more likely to choose more attractive avatars with attributes that they may not have in real life. This can cause issues with self-esteem if players are being treated differently online than they are in person. With more options for avatars, people are given the chance to build their “perfect self”, and this can definitely distort the way they perceive themselves. Before making avatars more inclusive, there are issues that need to be considered that can result from more variety.